Step 5: To fry or not to fry, that is the question...

Step 6: Bats all, folks...

In the end, this was really all about playing with your food. Fresh pasta is easy to make and experiment with. The fried raviolis could have been ma...

Umm, um, good. Chef, boy, are these raviolis scary.

Disclaimer: No bats were harmed in the making of this recipe. Bats are good for the environment and ecosystem. Build bat-houses to help save the bats.

Raviolis were always a favorite a school lunches when I was a kid. It was a step up from the tomato soup and cheese sandwiches. But the filling meal would have been way cooler if they had these bat shaped raviolis. Make these fresh and prepare more to save for a quick snack. Don't have tomato sauce handy? Ketchup works in a pinch and is also counted as a vegetable according to federal guidelines on nutrition.

Step 1: Get fresh...

Making fresh pasta is easy. Especially if you have a pasta machine. You could roll it out by hand too.

So I had this idea to make a dark colored pasta. I have made lighter colored pasta before but this case called for a black or dark brown color. I had no squid ink available, it also sometimes has an inky flavour so I did not want to make a batch of that. True story, when I was in kindergarten, I had to sit next to the kid that ate his crayons so I could rat him out to the teacher when he chewed on a crayon. The glue-eater sat behind me. But anyway, I didn't want to use food coloring and I had some Gravy Master which I thought was a more natural way to darken food, in retrospect, I don't really want to know how they make that stuff.

You will need:

A cup or two of all purpose flour, you can try various varieties depending on taste

A few eggs, use 1 and 1/2 eggs per cup of flour

some oil

salt

For the filling:

You can make anything you like, meat or vegetarian or mix

I used ground turkey to keep with the fowl theme. Actually, bats are mammals that fly.